Baltimore, MD (Gay Street)

There are two complementary measures for understanding the income of a neighborhood's residents: the average and the extremes. While a neighborhood may be relatively wealthy overall, it is equally important to understand the rate of people - particularly children - who are living at or below the federal poverty line, which is extremely low income. Some neighborhoods with a lower average income may actually have a lower childhood poverty rate than another with a higher average income, and this helps us understand the conditions and character of a neighborhood.

The neighbors in the Gay Street neighborhood in Baltimore are low income, making it among the lowest income neighborhoods in America. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 98.4% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 37.0% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 87.6% of U.S. neighborhoods.

The old saying "you are what you eat" is true. But it is also true that you are what you do for a living. The types of occupations your neighbors have shape their character, and together as a group, their collective occupations shape the culture of a place.

In the Gay Street neighborhood, 57.2% of the working population is employed in executive, management, and professional occupations. The second most important occupational group in this neighborhood is sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants, with 23.1% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations (12.9%), and 6.8% in manufacturing and laborer occupations.

Languages

The languages spoken by people in this neighborhood are diverse. These are tabulated as the languages people preferentially speak when they are at home with their families. The most common language spoken in the Gay Street neighborhood is English, spoken by 78.7% of households. Other important languages spoken here include Chinese and Japanese.

Ethnicity / Ancestry

Culture is shared learned behavior. We learn it from our parents, their parents, our houses of worship, and much of our culture – our learned behavior – comes from our ancestors. That is why ancestry and ethnicity can be so interesting and important to understand: places with concentrations of people of one or more ancestries often express those shared learned behaviors and this gives each neighborhood its own culture. Even different neighborhoods in the same city can have drastically different cultures.

In the Gay Street neighborhood in Baltimore, MD, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Asian (15.9%). There are also a number of people of Irish ancestry (4.8%), and residents who report Cuban roots (4.6%), and some of the residents are also of Italian ancestry (4.4%), along with some Sub-Saharan African ancestry residents (4.0%), among others. In addition, 18.1% of the residents of this neighborhood were born in another country.

Even if your neighborhood is walkable, you may still have to drive to your place of work. Some neighborhoods are located where many can get to work in just a few minutes, while others are located such that most residents have a long and arduous commute. The greatest number of commuters in Gay Street neighborhood spend under 15 minutes commuting one-way to work (54.3% of working residents), one of the shortest commutes across America.

Here most residents (52.9%) hop out the door and walk to work to get to work. In addition, quite a number also drive alone in a private automobile to get to work (17.4%) and 8.5% of residents also carpool with coworkers, friends, or neighbors for their daily commute. This is a special neighborhood for the number of people who walk to work. Combining exercise, low cost, and reduced pollution, plus the chance to see your neighbors, walking to work is fairly uncommon in America but likely to increase as people try to reduce their dependence on automobiles, and this neighborhood offers that opportunity today.